Monday, Monday

The day started slowly here. Both of the kids slept in and our school day didn't really get rolling until about 9. One of the perks of being home schoolers. :-)
Once everyone had breakfast and brushed teeth, we settled into our spots in the living room to do our morning Bible time. This is new for us this year and we are all really enjoying our morning ritual. The kids do their individual devotions/quiet time in their bedrooms before breakfast most days, and then we have our time together.
I had purchased a beautiful set of books last year called Balancing the Sword and we're working our way through the New Testament this year with volume 1. The books are a massive series of questions based on scripture. We read a chapter aloud (as of this morning we were up to Luke 5) and then there are 4-7 questions, (mostly fill-in the blank type), that the kids answer. The theory here is that you can't really understand what the Bible means until you know what the Bible says. So we read, sharing our study notes from our Bibles as appropriate, talk about the passages, etc. and answer our questions. Then we move to our other new study book for this year Training Hearts, Teaching Minds which is a devotion type book based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
The kids both have memory work as part of another book series we are using from Keepers of the Faith, and so far this year have memorized all 66 books of the Bible in order (both Old & New Testaments) and are just about done with memorizing the original 10 Commandments passage from Deuteronomy. We work on these things before and after our reading time. I have been very pleased to see how seriously they are taking their study and seem to be enjoying it. We often get the chance to talk about the lessons from their individual devotion books as well.
Monday is our piano lesson day - both kids have been taking lessons for a few years now - so we were busy getting things done before it was time to head off to lessons. During their lesson hour, we finished up the English grammar lessons and I got to do my walking time (40 minutes today!).
After we got home, we finished up with reading our history lesson on the Maya, tomorrow we will do the activity to go along with the lesson.

We are using Mystery of History Vol. 2 this year and really are learning a TON already. It covers the time period from the Early Church (Acts 2) up through the Middle Ages.
Last year we'd done MOH 1 which covered Creation to the Resurrection.
I really love this history curriculum as it shows all of world history at the same time as important Christian specific history (Bible events & the early church). We do a lot of reading, historical fiction of the same time periods as well as extra resource reading.

I like to say that by the time I get these 2 graduated, I will have the education I should have had the first time through! I really love home schooling! :-)